posted on 04 Mar 2018

Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs: The Left Bank World of Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer

When I first saw this book I rather leapt to the conclusion that it was going to be another of those amiable, largely biographic memoirs of the famous French bookshop crammed with portraits of bookish eccentrics and littered with tails of heroic failure and human warmth. It turns out that I was only partly right about all that.

What Canadian journalist and would-be writer, Jeremy Mercer has actually produced is something quite a bit more gritty than that and it's the sort of memoir that condenses events or people into new shapes and sometimes feels more like fiction than fact. The prose is a mix of journalistic reportage and novelisation that, I think fortunately, avoids the often irritating jauntiness of some of these bookish ‘memoirs’ and makes this a bit more of a meditation than a celebration.

Mercer finds himself in Paris because he’s on the run from some unpleasant gangster types having reneged on a commitment to keep their identities anonymous following a series of interviews. Alone, broke and trailing around the damp streets he heads for Shakespeare & Co. just to keep out of the rain for a while but inadvertently finds a home there.

Shakespeare & Co. was originally famously the creation of Sylvia Beech but this second incarnation that Mercer enters was the one created by the almost equally legendary George Whitman. The portrait Mercer gives us of Whitman creates the picture of an oddly engaging and sometimes frustrating quasi-hippy-cum-socialist who found a way to provide aspiring writers a bed amongst the mountains of books. Whitman asks that the writers who seek a bed with him should work in the shop by way of exchange and you get the distinct feeling that the shop takes on many of the attributes of a student’s bedroom. It’s grubby, random and shambolic. Whitman is also rather delightfully arbitrary in the way he doles out jobs and favours and, it seems, he’s not averse to stuffing shop money into books or gaps in the shelves.

But Whitman is also an odd mix of commercial nous and naivety and he’s often the target of exploitation by those he tries to help. But he relies on the loyalty of the young writers to police each other – a tactic that has a pretty mixed success rate. Somehow, and in the face of all logic, a sort of community emerges amongst the shop’s inhabitants and customers and it can, I think, claim to be unique in this respect.

Mercer, however, is less a bibliophile and more a journalist and he can’t put aside the skills he learned in that profession. He can’t help himself from contemplating the lives of those he’s sharing the shop space with and his conclusions are rather gloomy:

Looking back at those months, I realise everyone living at the bookstore had a ghost lurking somewhere not very far behind them..

As well as having dark back-stories many of the writers seeking sanctuary are often only writers in their own minds and most of them never complete anything and will eventually move on never having contributed much at all to the pool of literary achievement. Mercer tells us that "seven published novels have been written at Shakespeare and Company and thousands more begun" but it’s an unavoidable conclusion that the ones begun were doomed to remain unfinished.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, I started it as a bit of light refreshment but found it a deeper and more thoughtful experience than I’d expected. Copies are available in hard and paperback for very little and if you buy a copy you will spend a couple of engaged afternoons on the Left Bank.

 

Terry Potter

March 2018